New Christianity for a New World, A
Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How a New Faith is Being Born
-
-
4.3 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong described the toxins that are poisoning the Church. Now, in A New Christianity for a New World, he offers the antidote, calling Christians everywhere into a radical reformation for a new age.
A New Christianity for a New World is based on Spong’s William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard. Spong explains why traditional understandings of God, Christ, the Church and its rule and dogmas are wrong and dangerous. He focuses on spelling out his vision of God, Jesus and the church as a community of love, equality, and truth. Proposing a Christianity premised upon justice, love, and the rise of a new humanity, Bishop Spong has created the ultimate legacy of his struggle to discover and promote a Christianity that makes sense today.
John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000. As a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches throughout North America and the English-speaking world, he is one of the leading spokespersons for liberal Christianity. His books include Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his recent autobiography, Here I Stand.
“In this brave and important book, Bishop Spong continues his life-long quest for a living faith and church worthy of the Christ in whom we can find God in our time. His call for a new reformation is honest, deep, provocative, and needed -- one hopes there are those with ears to hear.” - Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessings and One River, Many Wells
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Religious reformer Spong builds upon the program he initiated in Why Christianity Must Change or Die as he outlines what he believes is an authentic faith for a new millennium. Taking cues from the works of John A.T. Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann, Spong proclaims that theism the view that a supernatural deity creates and provides for humanity is merely a "human coping device, created by traumatized self-conscious creatures to enable them to deal with the anxiety of self-awareness." The theistic God, for Spong as for Freud and Feuerbach before him, is nothing but a projection of our own desires and wishes. Since the theistic God was a construct that helped humans cope with their anxieties, the hysteria and trauma rampant in our society today is proof, says Spong, that the theistic God has died. But once theism is extinct, many of the central ideas of conventional Christianity, such as original sin, the incarnation and the Resurrection, tumble into uselessness. Spong's "new Christianity" is rather old, though. Just as in 19th-century theological liberalism, Jesus is god-presence and god is the ground of all being. Moreover, Spong recycles the central ideas of his previous nine books. At worst, this is an uninspiring and unoriginal tract for a formless and meandering quasi-spiritual life. At best, however, Spong openly reveals his honest struggles to fashion a living faith that transcends what he sees as the sterility of the Christianity in which he was formed.
